


Alma Mater

by FavorsTheFoolish



Series: Teen Wolf: Afterlife [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 01:12:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3509642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FavorsTheFoolish/pseuds/FavorsTheFoolish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers for up to 3.23.</p>
<p>As much as I love Scott and Stiles' friendship, I think that Allison and Lydia's is just as important.  I've been writing a couple things about the characters who've died, and what I think the Teen Wolf universe afterlife might be like.  This one is about Allison.</p>
<p>As for ships, I think this story works several ways, so much like the show, whoever you feel like shipping with whoever in this story, go for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alma Mater

She's looking into brown eyes when hers shut.  When she opens them again, the eyes looking back at her are blue, but just as full of tears. 

"We should never have gone back there," her mother chokes back a sob, gently moving Allison's hair from her face. Allison reaches up and takes her hand, and it's warm, and she smells like the cookies she'd always bake when she wanted to be extra terrifying, and it's her  mom. 

"I'm glad we did, " Allison answers, sitting up.   She doesn't know why she says it, but it spills out: "I'm sorry, Mom." 

Her mother helps her to sit, gathers her into a hug, then helps her to stand. 

"You don't have to be sorry, sweetheart; you have nothing to be sorry for."

It's not the house or the apartment in Beacon Hills that they go home to, but the house in New Hampshire.  They stayed in the Cape Cod style house the longest, from the time Allison was in the second grade until halfway through the first time she was in eighth. 

"I hope this is all right?" Victoria asks, seeming nervous in a way Allison hasn't seen her since the last time Grandma Argent visited before she died. 

"It's perfect, Mom," Allison says, running her fingers over the solid oak countertop in the kitchen, feeling the familiar change in texture around the knot in one plank that she had always thought looked like the eye of a big cat, the way the grain around it extended far and dark. 

"Do you think Dad will be okay?" she asks before she can stop her own mouth.  Her mother's hand pauses on the handle of the refrigerator door, then carries on opening it. 

"Not... okay, sweetie. No one is ever okay when their child dies. But he'll come home, when he's ready. To us."

Allison nods, pressing her lips tightly together while Victoria is facing the other way, biting back the scream that tries to escape at the thought of her dad, alone now, the only family he has left his own traitor father. 

"Is Aunt Kate here?" Allison asks, thinking of Gerard. Her mother smiles ruefully, pouring a cold glass of milk and setting it on the table, going to Allison and steering her to sit. Allison traces the condensation that has already started to form as her mother places a Tupperware box of cookies between them, the layers of separating waxed paper wrinkled. 

"She has yet to come calling.  Every now and then, I think… I catch a glimpse of her, across the street, in a car going the other direction, but we’ve never spoken.  My parents are in Maine, and Grandmother Argent is in Rhode Island, still. "

Allison glances out the window toward the forests, the mountains, formed by glaciers, smaller and gentler than the ones in California, where the plates of the earth bit into one another. 

“Everything’s still so far,” Allison murmurs softly.  Her mother sits and reaches across the table, squeezing her hand.  

“It’s a little different here,” she answers.  “You have to take the first step and the last step of every journey, but you can skip all the ones in the middle, if you wish.  It’s not quite the heaven I expected, or the hell I thought I might deserve.”

“I loved it here,” Allison says, focusing on her mother’s reaction.  “I think maybe you and Dad did too, but I could be projecting, I guess?  Kids can be pretty self-centered.”

Victoria’s tiny smile returns like a hiccup.

“So can adults,” she counters.  “We did though.  We loved it here, all of us.  It was the closest we ever got to normal, I suppose.”

Allison, seemingly out of nowhere, dissolves into a fit of giggles.  

“Heaven is a normal life,” she sputters.  “Oh, my god.  I’m sorry, that’s just--”

Victoria smiles more easily.

“As ironies go, it’s not unpleasant,” she sighs.  “I missed you, sweetheart, but I didn’t want to see you so soon.”

 

There are lots of ways to look in on the living, Allison learns.  Flip a mirror backwards.  Pour water into a metal bowl.  Crack the ice on a birdbath in winter.  All very traditional and mystical, poetic and elegant.  

She prefers the website, honestly.  It’s strange, and seems like it shouldn’t work, but she just types in the name of whoever she wants to see in the navigation bar, and voila.  It seems like it should be like a surveillance camera feed, but it’s all lovingly shot, zooming in just when she wants to see more, panning to and fro, as though it’s made just for her, which, really, she guesses it is.   

It’s hard.  Harder than she thought it would be.  Her room is as she remembers it from being thirteen, but adjusts as she misses things, as nostalgia hits her for this or that.  When she longs to flip through her old photographs, the book is right where she first thinks to look.  When she wants to hug the plush rooster Scott won for her at the Beacon County Fair (completely innocently, he hadn’t realized the possible implications until Stiles had explained them, and then his eyes went wide, and he stammered, and Allison hugs it tighter at the memory), it’s sitting to the left of her pillow like it’s been there all along.  Anything she misses just turns up.

Anything except anyone.  Even when she finds long red hairs on her pillow from time to time, she never finds the one they belong to.

She feels safer here than she has anyplace, her attic room at the top of a narrow staircase, a skylight over her bed.  They’d gone from New Hampshire to DC, ostensibly for a large federal contract, stayed there for all of eight months.  San Francisco had been next.  It wasn’t until they moved to Beacon Hills that Allison had her starry night sky back again, and even there, there was never the fine dust, the visible stripe of the galaxy’s arms, that she could see on a moonless night at the high school football field.  She’d never attend the high school, not in New Hampshire, but she crossed that field so many times, toting a hopelessly out of season lawn chair and a thermos of hot cocoa through the snow to stargaze, the cold making the air more clear.  

Now she gazes on her father and her friends, who might as well be stars for how far away they seem now.  She sees herself mourned, and she wishes she could help, that she could reassure them, but there’s no website for them to look on her.  Not that she knows of, anyway, and if there were, Danny, Stiles, Lydia, one of them would have found it.  

Sometimes she walks, skipping the middle steps.  She wanders San Francisco with the rest of the dead, the streets shimmering with the different eras of history.  She means to go straight back home, she does, but it’s just another two steps to Beacon Hills.  It always was, and it always would be, but somehow, being in San Francisco, it seems like the place to go next.  

She catches glimpses of people in her periphery, but she doesn’t engage anyone; she’s just not there yet.  She’s not ready to face Erica, when one of the last things Erica saw before getting captured by the Alphas was Allison’s arrow in her leg, Allison about to kill her, Allison about to kill Boyd.  Maybe they saw it all, everything their surviving friends went through, like Allison does now.  Allison just isn’t ready.  

Apparently not being ready works both ways, because though she glimpses Matt Daehler, he never seems to see her.  

She sits in the clearing in the preserve where she and Scott used to watch the stars, or she would watch the stars and Scott would watch her watching them, and looks at her father and Isaac boarding a plane to France in a little hand mirror flipped over.  The scene shifts when she wills it to, this time to Stiles sitting on the nemeton, reading as he often does, performing sealing rituals where she watched them bury the jar with the nogitsune.  Sometimes he rails, shouting at the ground and the stump until he’s hoarse, grinding the heels of his hands against the sockets of his eyes.  

Sometimes Scott comes and gets him, coaxing him back to his Jeep more often than not, but once or twice having grabbed Stiles and thrown him over his shoulder, then into the back seat while Scott took the driver’s seat.  Those days were the ones when Stiles had beaten his knuckles bloody against dead wood.  

Those were also the days that, once Scott and Stiles were gone, Derek Hale would emerge from the woods, smell out the spots on the stump where Stiles had bled, and char them with a lighter, pressing the earth over the jar down solid with his boots.  Whatever he had to say to the nogitsune, he didn’t say out loud.  

Allison gets up, and takes the first step away from Beacon Hills and the last step to the door of her house in New Hampshire.  She greets her mother and grandmothers drinking tea, more at ease with each other than they had ever been in life, and goes up to her room.

“I’m really mad at you,” bites a voice from her bed, clipped and tight.  Allison’s heart stops in her chest, because Lydia is  there,  not reflected, not on a monitor, but flesh-and-blood, or ghost-and-spirit, right there.  She’s sitting sideways, calves mostly under her thighs, knees bent and bare, she has her hair done in the braided crown that Allison used to teasingly call the Little House on the Prairie style.  She’s wearing one of her fine, gauzy, sage green dresses that brings out her eyes, and she’s wearing Allison’s jacket.  

Her lower lip is stuck out but stiff, because Lydia is actually upset, not posing at it to try and be cute or win sympathy, because like she said, she’s really mad at Allison.

“How are you here?” Allison asks, then her stomach drops.  “Oh no, Lydia, no… but everyone was  fine-- ”

Lydia huffs angrily, whipping her legs from under her to stamp both feet on the floor, back straight as she fists her hands in the bedspread.

“You. Weren’t. Fine,” Lydia snaps.  “Neither am I.  I’m not dead, but I am  not fine and did I mention that I am furious with you?”

“How are you  here? ” Allison repeats, reaching out and touching Lydia’s shoulder.  The contact seems to break something in Lydia, whose tears spill over.  

“I’m here because I still hear you.  All the time.  I hear you talk to your mom, and I’d know your voice anywhere, even with all the others, and I’m so mad at you Allison!”  Lydia cries, and Allison kneels in front of the bed and hugs Lydia’s waist fiercely.  

“I’m sorry,” Allison says into the buttons of her dress, into the gauzy fabric that looks soft at a distance but is sandpaper-raspy to the touch.  Lydia doesn’t hug her back, her hands still fisted in the bedspread.

“You left me and you didn’t say goodbye.  You got my message and you came anyway, and you’re smarter than that!  I thought that we were all past the whole Lydia’s-in-the-dark thing, I thought I could trust all of you to  listen to me , why didn’t you listen?”

Allison can’t hold herself together any longer, and both of them are shaking with the tears.  

“I thought you were being noble,” Allison answers, and Lydia thumps her fist lightly against Allison’s back.

“I’m not noble, stupid!  I’m scared, and I make bad choices, and I know almost everything but I didn’t know how to stop what was going to happen; I was just trying to stop it.  And I need closure that I’m never going to get because I still hear everyone, every person we’ve ever known who’s died, so you’re going to listen to why I’m mad at you and fucking validate my feelings, okay?”

Allison clings for just a second longer, feeling the dull thump of Lydia’s tears falling into her hair, and then nods, sitting back, bracing herself.  Lydia takes a deep, shaky breath, wiping the tears off her face and trying to regain something like composure.

“The day I met you, I just liked your jacket.  You’re beautiful and everyone was interested in you because you were new, and I wanted to keep interest on me, so I made sure that we were side by side.  I didn’t actually have  friends.  I had alliances.  I used your relationship with Scott to make him play so that the lacrosse team would look better so that I would look better.

“Then we went bowling, and… did you know you’re the first person who ever called me out on trying to make Jackson look good?  I didn’t get it at the time, at all,” Lydia says, staring at the far wall.  “Being better than my boyfriend at bowling wouldn’t help me, but it would hurt him, and if he looked weak, I looked weak.  I didn’t get why you didn’t care that Scott was terrible, why he didn’t shut down when you helped him.  

“Then, after Peter attacked the five of us at the school, you dumped Scott because he was lying to you, and I really didn’t get that either.  Of course he didn’t tell you everything. You don’t tell your allies everything; that just makes you weak.”

Lydia gives a bitter grin.

“‘I read it somewhere,’” she quotes herself.  “I saw an opening; Jackson was on the way down, Scott was on the way up.  I could waste my energy trying to build Jackson back up, even more  maintaining him, or I could just let everything run its course.  Jackson beat me to it when he dumped me, of course, but… that’s when things got really, really weird.  You forgave me for kissing Scott.  Blew it off like it was no big deal at all.  You even made sure I had a date to the dance, and did it in a way that made  me look good.  You going with Jackson… just like that, all the drama was gone.  I thought you were a genius, because I didn’t get at the time that… you were my friend.  You didn’t want power over me.  You didn’t want my power over other people.  You were lied to too, and the people who were supposed to care about you kept your power from you by lying to you.  Just like me.  I mean, looking back, my Mom talking bullshit about my Dad and vice versa to try to be my favorite doesn’t really compare to withholding the entire world of the supernatural, but… you woke me up.”

Lydia looks at Allison’s stunned, confused face.  

“I’m sorry.  The backstory isn’t exactly flattering to me.  The fact that I’m telling it to you is the only way I can really prove to you, and to myself, that I’m not… that what’s left, what’s next, is all true.”

Lydia slides off the bed, sitting on the floor in front of Allison, tucking her knees against her chest, the confessional over.  You have to be close to tell secrets.

“You were the only person I could actually hear while I was unconscious, in the hospital, but then when I woke up, you had secrets from me too, which should’ve made me angry, but instead I just missed you.  I kept missing you, even though you were right there.  I’d been alone my whole life, but not having you was the first time I really felt lonely.”

“I’m sorry,” Allison whispers, and Lydia’s hand darts out to grab hers, squeezing so tight that it hurts.

“Don’t be, not for that.  If I hadn’t met you, I would still be trying to find some  boy.  A literal trophy husband.  I’d make some boy fall in love with me and then destroy him if he couldn’t portray the right image, because that’s… growing up, that’s what I thought you were  supposed  to do.  Love was so obviously not a thing, because my mom and my dad didn’t love each other, and I couldn’t remember a time I ever thought they had.  I tried to do everything that Jackson needed, because I thought that’s what he wanted too, the unified front.  

“Then you came along.  You didn’t want sex, you didn’t want to be homecoming queen, you just wanted… it’s still so confusing to me that I don’t know what to call it.  You just wanted to be close for the sake of being close.”

Allison grips tighter now, breath hitching.

“And that is why I’m so damned angry at you for dying.  I felt you go but I wasn’t there with you.  I made Scott tell me about it, even though it killed him to relive it and I wanted to kill him because it should’ve been me.  You died in Scott’s arms and it should’ve been mine.  Scott may have been your first love, but love wasn’t a thing I ever even knew existed until I met you.”

Lydia’s jaw is set fiercely and she’s terrified when she says,

“You’re my first love.  You are the love of my life.  And it has nothing to do with hormones, or sex, or power.  I would’ve died for you, and you didn’t let me, and I’m really, really mad at you.”

Allison un-crumbles at that.  She feels the phantom of the stab wound that killed her seal shut and stop bleeding, and she grabs Lydia’s other hand in hers, holding them both together, her chin pressed against them, in turn pressed against Lydia’s knees.  

“I wouldn’t be me if I’d let you die for me,” Allison says.  

Lydia’s lip quivers at that, and she’s crying all over again.

“You’re a stupid noble asshole and I’m still mad at you,” she sobs, twisting her hands free and squirming to hug Allison, both of them hugging this time.  

“I know,” Allison agrees, because she knows she’s being a hypocrite in the way only noble assholes can be.  “But if you’d died for me, I wouldn’t have made it.  I know I wouldn’t have.  I think I could’ve kept going without anyone else, but not without you.”  

Lydia’s ribcage twitches in another shaky sob.

“You suck for making me live without you, Allison,” she sighs, then sits back, wiping her eyes again.  “I haven’t got long.  Stiles and Scott’s boss are going to wake me up soon.  It’s longer there than it is here.”

Allison’s stomach drops.

“How much longer?”

“I’ll have to check, but I’ll have been out for about twenty four hours when I get back.  I’m still working out all the variables,” Lydia says.  “Which means--”

“You can’t come back,” Allison finishes.  Lydia rolls her eyes.

“I can’t come back  often.  Do you know how amazing it is for my complexion to get a full extra day of sleep every month?”  Lydia mock-scoffs.  “I’m coming back just for the nap; it’s not all about you.”

“I can see you,” Allison blurts.  “I mean, I can see whoever I want to.  It’s easy, everyone here does it all the time.  I can’t hear you, but I swear, I check on you all the time.

Lydia gives a rueful grin.

“And I can’t see you, but I can still hear you.  I swear, all this otherworldly bullshit keeps balancing like chem equations, once you know the atomic weights,” she sighs.  “So I’ll write to you.  I’ll leave it places where you can see.  My vanity mirror in last season’s lipsticks.”

Lydia stands up, Allison standing with her.

“I love you,” Lydia says as they hold each other.  “I swear to god if you don’t spend at least five minutes an hour telling me how pretty and wonderful I am, I’m going to come back here and dump bleach on all your afterlife fashionista clothes, Allison, don’t you  ever stop talk--”

And then Allison is holding thin air, a memory of Lydia’s raspy sundress fabric on her skin.  She crumbles again, just for a minute, a pile of herself on the floor sobbing before she takes a deep breath and goes to her computer, putting Lydia’s name into the navigation bar.  There she is, same sage dress, same Little House crown of braid, in the vet’s office, sitting up on the exam table.

“I love you too,” Allison says, touching her fingertip to Lydia’s hand on the screen.  Lydia snaps her fingers at Stiles, who scrambles for her purse, handing it to her.  

She takes out a compact mirror and a coral lipstick, writing on the glass,

I know. ;)


End file.
